Amc's 'Blacklist' A Hard Look At Hollywood's Darkest Days

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American Movie Classics thrives on nostalgia, from its lineup of vintage films to its excellent sitcom Remember WENN to its awe-struck commercials celebrating John Wayne and Marilyn Monroe.

But the golden memories stop for 90 minutes tonight. At 10, the cable channel turns to film industry's dark side with Blacklist: Hollywood on Trial. This thoughtful, deeply personal documentary explores the hysteria in the 1940s and 1950s over communism in the film business.

Ultimately, it's more than a Hollywood story, because it tells how easily personal freedoms can be abused by the government and popular opinion.

Despite all that star power, the documentary's strength lies in the pained -and sometimes defiant - reminiscences of a few of the roughly 250 artists who were blacklisted. Among the eloquent witnesses are actresses Lee Grant and Marsha Hunt, writer Ring Lardner Jr. (M*A*S*H), and directors Edward Dmytryk (The Caine Mutiny) and Abe Polonsky (Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here).

Blacklist exposes as preposterous the idea that Hollywood in the late 1940s could be considered a center of radical thinking. The program notes that the Hollywood dream factory was slow to address social issues, much less embrace communism, and that studio chiefs controlled content. Left-wing filmmakers rarely could espouse their views.

But that reality hardly mattered when Cold War anxieties raged.

In 1947, the House Committee on Un-American Activities started trying to root out Communist sympathizers in Hollywood. The industry of make-believe heroes had a brush with real-life matters of conscience, and the encounter was ugly.

The hearings turned into hideous spectacles - filled with sucking up, shouting and gavel-pounding - that violated constitutional rights. Witnesses friendly to the red-hunters, like conservatives Robert Taylor and Adolphe Menjou, railed against perceived radical elements in the industry. Some turned informers.

The hostile witnesses, the supposed subversives, refused to answer the committee's questions, and some launched into speeches before being cut off. Blacklisted writer Lardner regrets this behavior, telling AMC that he and his friends should have acted with more dignity.

Shortly afterward, the movie industry started the blacklist, which denied work to Communists and those suspected of leftist sympathies. The hostile witnesses known as ''The Hollywood Ten'' were charged with contempt of Congress and later imprisoned.

But the blacklist's impact was wide-ranging. It wrecked the careers of artists like John Garfield, who refused to testify before the House committee, and those like Edward G. Robinson, who were perceived to have liberal sympathies. Bolstered by gossip and innuendo, it ended marriages, forced writers to work under pseudonyms and sent artists into exile.

And it forced Hollywood, that hotbed of hypocrisy, to act even more hypocritically. Tinseltown kept handing Oscars to movies written by blacklisted writers: The Brave One by Dalton Trumbo; The Bridge on the River Kwai by Carl Foreman and Michael Wilson; and The Defiant Ones, co-written by Ned Young.

The AMC program makes history personal and involving. Actress Marsha Hunt, who was never a Communist, watched her career dry up for simply speaking out against the House committee on a Washington trip. ''The public just sort of wondered whatever happened to me,'' she says. ''They would scold me for not being busier.''

One of her fellow protesters, Humphrey Bogart, later backed away from his activism and said the trip had been ill-advised.

Oscar winner Lee Grant couldn't find work for 16 years after speaking at a memorial service for blacklisted actor J. Edward Bromberg. She was only 19. ''I learned so much during that period,'' she says. ''It was the most important thing that happened to me in my life.''

But the blacklisted artists still disagree about the past. The Hollywood Communists were ''fundamentally a social club,'' says writer/director Abe Polonsky.

''A deception,'' counters director Edward Dmytryk. After being blacklisted, he informed on 24 former colleagues and watched his career rebound. ''Why should I be a martyr for a cause I didn't believe in?'' he asks.

Blacklist underscores the dangers of reining in the arts. The blacklist made the movies blander and the studios more reluctant to take chances. And it deprived the cinema of some first-rate talent.

''The only thing worth doing is protesting against authority, no matter whose authority - left, right, middle,'' Polonsky says. ''Art should be free, and art can only illuminate.''